On April 15 1989, 24,000 Liverpool fans travelled to a football match. 96 never returned. Over 20 years after Britain’s worst sporting disaster, we want the world to see the faces of the fans whose hopes and dreams for the future ended that day.Collectively they’ve become known as ‘The 96’ but to the families and friends they left behind, they were simply a dad, a son, a brother and a sister; a cousin, an auntie, an uncle and a grandad; a boyfriend, a husband, a soul mate and a best friend.

As the wife of one of the supporters who never came home so eloquently put it in a letter published on this website on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, “To the world my husband is one of the 96, but to me and his children, he was always our number one.”

To those who didn’t know them, the fans who died at Hillsborough that day may just be a number of names etched into the Hillsborough Memorial marble.

24,000 tickets, 23 turnstiles, two criminally overcrowded pens, 96 dead and 766 people injured – numbers alone don’t even begin to tell half the story of a disaster that has shaped Liverpool Football Club and the fans that will forever follow it.

Probably the most significant number in this whole sorry tragedy is the one that depicts the age of each victim on the slide show below.

That number, and the faces staring back at you – captured during happier times – tells you everything you need to know about why the events of April 15, 1989 and the fans who died that day will never ever be forgotten.